Discussion
This article has provided the first “big data” analysis of the #Mission22 movement that went viral across multiple social media platforms in 2016. We began by arguing that Web 2.0 has ushered in profound changes to how people depict and construct identities that articulate with wider transformations in self and identity in conditions of late-modernity. The “confessional” quality of Web 2.0 means individuals and groups are presented with unprecedented opportunities to “mass self-depict” through new communication and Internet technologies. We suggest that the focus on how Web technologies are implicated in the formation of moral subjectivities is something that has been overlooked in the extant research on identity and Web 2.0 technologies.

Filling this gap, we used the #Mission22 movement on Twitter as an empirical site to analyse how contemporary subjects construct and visually depict moral identities in online contexts. A central finding of our analysis of 225883 Twitter posts is that most engagement with #Mission22 was through retweeting. Our data show that retweets were by far the most popular way to interact and engage with the movement. In other words, most people were not producing original or new content in how they participated in the movement but were re-sharing – re-depicting – what others had shared. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention to the architectural affordances of social media platforms, in this case, the affordances of the ‘retweet’ button, and how they shape online identity practices and moral expression. We use moral expression here as a broad term to capture the different ways individuals and groups make moral evaluations based on a responsiveness to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing (Sayer). This approach provides an emic account of everyday morality and precludes, for example, wider philosophical debates about whether patriotism or nationalistic solidarity can be understood as moral values.

The prominence of the retweet in driving the shape and nature of #Mission22 raises questions about the depth of moral engagement being communicated. Is the dominance of the retweet suggestive of a type of “moral slacktivism”? Like its online political equivalent, does the retweet highlight a shallow and cursory involvement with a cause or movement? Did online engagement translate to concrete moral actions such as making a donation to the cause or engaging in some other form of civic activity to draw attention to the movement? These questions are beyond the scope of this article but it is interesting to consider the link between the affordances of the platform, capacity for moral expression and how this translates to face-to-face moral action. Putting aside questions of depth, people are compelled not to ignore these posts, they move from “seeing” to “posting”, to taking action within the affordances of the architectural platform.

What then is moving Twitter users to morally engage with this content? How did this movement go viral? What helped bust this movement out of the “long tail distribution” which characterises most movements – that is, few movements “take-off” and become durable within the congested attention economies of social media environments. The Top 10 most retweeted tweets provide powerful answers here. All of them feature highly emotive and affective visual depictions, either high impact photos and statements, or videos of people/groups doing pushups in solidarity together. The images and videos align affective, bodily and fitness practices with nationalistic and patriotic themes to produce a powerful and moving moral cocktail. The Top 50 words also capture the emotionally evocative use of moral language: words like: alone, fight, challenge, better, believe, good, wrong, god, help, mission, weakness and will.

The emotional and embodied visual depictions that characterise the the Top 10 retweets and Top 50 words highlight how moral identity is not just a cerebral practice, but one that is fundamentally emotional and bodily. We do morality not just with our minds and heads but also with our bodies and our hearts. Part of the power of this movement, then, is the way it mobilises interest and involvement with the movement through a physical and embodied practice – doing push-ups. Visually depicting oneself doing push-ups online is a powerful display of morality identity. The “lay morality” being communicated is that not only are you somebody who cares about the flourishing and suffering of Others, you are also a fit, active and engaged citizen. And of course, the subject who actively takes responsibility for their health and well-being is highly valued in neoliberal risk contexts (Lupton).

There is also a strong gendered dimensions to the visual depictions used in #Mission22. All of the Top 10 retweets feature images of men, mostly doing push-ups in groups. In the case of the second most popular retweet, it is two men in suits doing push-ups while three sexualised female singers “look-on” admiringly. Further analysis needs to be done to detail the gendered composition of movement participation, but it is interesting to speculate whether men were more likely to participate. The combination of demonstrating care for Other via a strong assertion of physical strength makes this a potentially more masculinised form of moral self-expression.

Overall, Mission22 highlights how online self-work and cultivation can have a strong moral dimension. In Foucault’s language, the self-work involved in posting a video or image of yourself doing push-ups can be read as “an intensification of social relations”. It involves an ethics that is about self-creation through visual and textual depictions. Following the more pessimistic line of Bauman or Turkle, posting images of oneself doing push-ups might be seen as evidence of narcissism or a consumerist self-absorption. Rather than narcissism, we want to suggest that Mission22 highlights how a self-based moral practice – based on bodily, emotional and visual depictions – can extend to Others in an act of mutual care and exchange. Again Foucault helps clarify our argument: “the intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorisation of the Other”. What our work does, is show how this operates empirically on a large-scale in the new confessional contexts of Web 2.0 and its cultures of mass self-depiction.

Surkus, an emerging app [allows] businesses to quickly manufacture their ideal crowd and pay the people to stand in place like extras on a movie set. They've even been hand-picked by a casting agent of sorts, an algorithmic one that selects each person according to age, location, style and Facebook "likes."

Acting disengaged while they idle in line could tarnish their "reputation score," an identifier that influences whether they'll be "cast" again. Nobody is forcing the participants to stay, of course, but if they leave, they won't be paid — their movements are being tracked with geolocation.

Welcome to the new world of "crowdcasting."

For example: A gaming company throwing a launch party might ask Surkus to find men and women ages 18 to 32 who like comic books, day parties, dance music and the company's product.

Once potential attendees have been identified from Surkus's user profiles, the app sends "availability requests" to users' phones... participants are asked to remain discreet about the origin of their invitations. Oftentimes, women are paid considerably more than men.

Caroline Thompson, 27, a contributing writer for Vice, said she downloaded Surkus and attended an event last year at a Chicago club full of "finance bros" on a Thursday night... "80 percent of the women at the club were there because of the app," she said... she was paid $40 to attend the event.

there’s a critique of a lot of the advances in machine learning that the corpus on which it is based has biases built into it. So DeepText analyzed all Facebook comments—analyzed some massive corpus of words that people have typed into the internet. When you analyze those, you get certain biases built into them. So for example, I was reading a paper and someone had taken a corpus of text and created a machine learning algorithm to rank restaurants, and to look at the comments people had written under restaurants and then to try and guess the quality of the restaurants. He went through and he ran it, and he was like, “Interesting,” because all of the Mexican restaurants were ranked badly. So why is that? Well it turns out, as he dug deeper into the algorithm, it’s because in massive corpus of text the word “Mexican” is associated with “illegal”—”illegal Mexican immigrant” because that is used so frequently. And so there are lots of slurs attached to the word “Mexican,” so the word “Mexican” has negative connotations in the machine learning-based corpus, which then affects the restaurant rankings of Mexican restaurants.

Nagle, of course, is herself on the political left, and Kill All Normies reflects her frustrations with intra-left political disputes of the last five years, which have tended to pit identitarians against a more explicitly socialist left. At one level, Nagle suggests that there was a symbiosis between the social-justice left and the alt-right: The left’s tendency to focus on racial and sexual identity while explicitly demonizing privileged groups — notably straight white men — may have pushed members of these groups into the arms of the alt-right, while the stronger the alt-right became, the more it confirmed the social-justice left in the belief that its critics, even those on the left, were either Nazis or Nazis’ useful idiots. But aside from such direct symbiosis, Nagle suspects — rightly in my view — that the real damage of the “Tumblrization of left-politics” may have been to spur a “brain drain from the left,” as people fled from a political brand increasingly associated with hysteria, witch-hunting, and intolerance of dissent.